Colliding Black Holes Reveal a Whirlpool in Spacetime #1866

In this episode, Ray Cochrane unpacks how two colliding black holes revealed a whirlpool in spacetime, a direct detection of frame dragging hidden in the cleanest gravitational-wave signal ever recorded. Additional stories cover the James Webb Space Telescope, counting 16.5 million stars in the Cigar Galaxy, SpaceX rolling out Starship V3, deadly back-to-back earthquakes in Venezuela, GitHub fighting a California law that could break open source, and Meta engineering a battery narrow enough to live in a pair of glasses.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens with a personal update before the night’s lead story. He recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Portland State University, celebrated with family in town, and launched a new site at rayc.world. That site links to a final-project study he built on collaborative filtering using podcasting data, hosted at cohort.rayc.world and drawn from OP3 analytics. He also plans to return to the show’s classic twice-weekly cadence on Mondays and Thursdays. From there, he goes deep on a new black hole discovery, then pivots through space, earth science, climate, biotech, open source, cloud infrastructure, and consumer hardware.

Colliding Black Holes Reveal a Whirlpool in Spacetime

Two black holes spiraled together, merged, and sent a gravitational wave rippling across the universe. Researcher Neil Lu and colleagues at the Australian National University found the fingerprint of frame dragging buried in GW250114, the cleanest signal LIGO has ever recorded. Frame dragging means a spinning black hole drags spacetime around with it, like a spoon turning in honey, except the honey is reality itself. Remarkably, the wave changed the distance between your nose and your ear as it passed, by far less than the width of a single atom.

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Webb Counts the Stars in the Cigar Galaxy

NASA released a striking new James Webb Space Telescope view of Messier 82, the edge-on galaxy nicknamed the Cigar Galaxy. Because Webb sees in infrared, it peers straight through the dust that normally hides the galaxy’s interior. Combined with archival Hubble data, the image resolves roughly 16.5 million individual stars. M82 is a starburst galaxy, meaning it forms stars at a furious rate, a frenzy likely triggered when it merged with a neighbor.

SpaceX Rolls Out Starship V3

SpaceX officially introduced Starship V3, the third generation of the largest rocket ever built. The vehicle now flies on the Raptor 3 engine, pushing liftoff thrust to around 20 million pounds and maki